How to plan and select photos for use on your website

Advice for photographers (and people who hire them) from professional web designers

Special considerations for your website photography are not rocket science, but we’ve prepared a few helpful recommendations to keep in mind before your shoot.

Tell your photographer:

Prioritize landscape orientation. A couple options of vertical shots are good for bio pages and in-line images, but most of the shots web designers are able to use for banners are going to be horizontal.

Take plenty of shots that have the subject off to one side, or with plenty of background to work with. Don’t be precious about composition because artful cropping will be lost in mobile scaling 90% of the time--try to make sure the photos still pass muster even if they're tightened down to 1/3 of the original width.

Related to above: leave room for text copy and other content to float over some of the images without smooshing the subject's face.

Play with depth of field and provide a mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus backgrounds. Again, sometimes backing off the subject wayyyy more than you usually would is a great plan.

In general, please consider that 50% or more of your website’s visitors will be using mobile devices, and that your website is not your photographer’s personal portfolio. These images need to perform work, and they have particular specs.